Bye Fox Footy, welcome Fox Sports 3

Saturday, 30th September 2006 11:00am

Early tomorrow morning the Fox Footy channel will be axed after 5 years on air and also
tomorrow sees the launch of Fox Sports 3 another general sports channel to add to Fox Sports
1 and Fox Sports 2. I will miss the Fox Footy channel for its live coverage of Saturday and
Sunday AFL matches and then the repeats during the week. Having said that I never understood
why it continued to run during the AFL off-season.

The Fox Sports 3 is a welcome addition and will mean that Foxtel will be able to show many
live games at the same time. This will also mean that from now the English championship
matches will be shown live rather than delayed as has been the case so far save for one or
two matches.

With the AFL season finishing today with the AFL Grand Final the Fox Footy channel will
sorely be missed for real when the AFL pre-season tournament begins next year and suddenly
there is no place where you can catch up with any missed matches at any time.

The first local sport or match to be shown live on Fox Sports 3 will be the A-League top of the table
encounter between Melbourne Victory and Queensland Roar.

The problem in Round 6 (well, from the Melbourne vs Roar game onward) for someone like myself who doesn't have Fox in my home, is that the pubs just didn't know what was going on. I vent my spleen on my own site, but will have to update my thoughts as I do some more research. At least some of my assumptions were wrong.

It did seem crazy on Sunday. The two Brisbane vs Melbourne games were perfectly adjacent. There were several people at the pub wanting to watch first the football then the rugby. How ideal a situation for cross-promotion can you get? Cross-promotion of the sports, maybe, but I mean just of the pubs, or Fox or whatever. Not only was there no promotion, the pubs were not even briefed on what to do. Yesterday I tried five seperate pubs and they still didn't know what Fox 3 was.

It's a problem if we are concerned for the future of the A-League audience. Especially as the rugby and AFL has just finished, this was/is exactly the moment to garner the football audience. By moving to Fox 3 all of a sudden the opposite occurred. Conspiracy? No, I suspect a stuff up.

Well done Melbourne and Sydney by the way. I was backing Brisbane and Adelaide, but they were beaten soundly and deservedly.

Hamish, for home users, Fox Sports 3 appeared on the program listing like any other channel on
Sunday morning. There could be a difference between the Foxtel in the pubs and the one in
the homes. I hope they will have the situation resolved in time for Friday's match.

In the Adelaide/Sydney match it looks like Adelaide missed suspended Shengqing Qu and
injured Fernando too much but the day surely belonged to Benito Carbone. I only watched the second
half and I thought he played well and it looks like Sydney after the departure of Yorke
needed a playmaker and in Carbone I think they have made a good find. But lets not forget that this is just one
game, so lets wait and see if he can repeat the performance this coming round against Queensland Roar. reply